Pipex

Way back in 2003 I moved my dial-up account from SoftwareWarehouse (remember the email address @swinternet?) to Pipex. In 2004 I helped people in my area campaign for broadband and we achieved it that year. I remained with Pipex and, although the support has never been particularly brilliant, I stayed with it; because, in our family, we are all technically quite competent and never had much need to ring the HelpLine.

The Pipex buy-out by Tiscali and subsequent takeover by TalkTalk didn't actually have much effect on our account; in fact the monthly fee has come down recently.
But....trying to access information on the old Pipex pages is pointless. It's all out of date and I suppose TalkTalk are just trying to obliterate the Pipex name.

Right now, I'm dealing with some painful Internet outages and until I can determine the cause, I have mixed feelings about the set-up. Many people are complaining about dropped ADSL lines; and until recently I had never experienced it. I doubt if TalkTalk customers are the only ones with this issue, but it is obviously not a good thing when you are paying for a service. I've had to install a dial-up to give me back-up access in a time of total failure.

I'm in a rural area, at max stretch from the exchange, so a speed of around 2 Mb/s is all I can get. It's not actually a problem, it gives us all we need; we don't do games or live-streaming so reliable connection is more important to us than huge speeds.

Email; the Pipex mailboxes are admittedly very rarely out of action and I have experienced very little in terms of problems.
Webspace; never used it.
Could I recommend Pipex? Well, I presume it no longer takes in customers other than through the TalkTalk portal. It used to be a good isp. Now it's almost dead. I cannot recommend TalkTalk at this point in time either because, as said, I am awaiting some replies to current problems.

Pipex - subsidiary of TalkTalk

This is just a nice little copy/paste job of how Customer Service handled my inquiry when I decided to accept their invitation to "Chat" with an online representative.


"Please wait for a site operator to respond.

Hello, my name is 'Melissa'. How can I help you today?

you: Hi, I'm just wondering what the cheapest/best deal is for Broadband only

you: I can see it's £10 for Broadband + Landline

you: and £15 for Broadband only... yet I'm never going to have a homephone at this residence

Melissa: okay no problem, can i take your telephone number and postcode please, will you not be looking to have your line rental aswel?

you: I'd rather not give out information, and besides it's for a property I've yet to move in to anyawys

you: ways*

you: And if by 'line rental' you mean telephone line, then no... I have a cell phone, and I don't want a home phone

You are not currently in a chat session.

You are not currently in a chat session.

You are not currently in a chat session."

Lol, as you can see, they apparently lost interest in me as any kind of a customer as soon as I denied them access to my personal information. Of course, as most of you know, when they harvest your phone number / address etc, they spam you for the rest of your life, and sell off this information to all of their partner-groups.

My internet connection keeps cutting out. So I called Pipex....

1.
They've lied to me countless times.
First they tell me that their second tech support team will call me back the same evening because they are the ones who can fix the problem. no call.

I call them back and they tell me it will take 48 hours.
I wait for 2 weeks but they never call.

I call them back and the guy just tells me they will call me back.

(no call of course even though they know both my home phone and mobile)

2.
Pipex has two different tech support departments (apparently):
TECH 1 are the unhelpful people you reach when you call. They just ask some dumb questions like "what is the status of the lights on the router?".
Then when they're done asking stupid questions they tell me that my case has to be escalated to their "technical team" (Let's call them "TECH 2") and that you will be called back within 48 hours.

Tech 1 are unable to make calls, so if you need to disconnect the cable from the socket (as tech 1 tell you to do) you then have to call back and explain the whole thing again to another agent.
They flat out REFUSE to call me back on my mobile so i can still speak to them whilst sorting out my cables etc. (and of course if i call them back from my mobile the price of the call "may vary")

Tech 2 (the ones who are meant to call you back) are completely unable to receive phone calls.
Tech 1 refuses to just connect me to them, telling me they have no phone.
I said to the guy "Are you seriously telling me your tech support department has no phones?" to which he replied that they can only make calls.
The same guy also refused to let me speak to his supervisor, telling me that he does not have one. Then when i asked him if he owned the company he told me that he has a supervisor but that he is busy and that I would have to be on hold for "a very long time" (his words).

Max 500 words for this review so i've posted the full review here:
http://pastehtml.com/view/1bsg7yj.html

Nitsan.

I went with Pipex a long time ago, I used to get between 4-6Mbps, as I write this my download speed is about 1Mbps. Pipex are without a doubt terrible, do not even consider using them!!!

Hopefully people will vote with their feet and make these guys wake up!

Utterly rubbish since takeovers, Talk Talk are the final nail in the coffin. Pinching bandwidth down to <512k often rendering YouTube and iPlayer unusable.

Quit them, best thing I ever did was cancel the direct debit with the bank as they have been harassing me for money that I owe them for the past couple of months even though my broadband migration completed in the middle of February.

Oh, and they also said that my telephone service is now cut off... hmmm... doesn't seem to be... maybe that is because I NEVER RENTED MY LINE FROM THEM!!! Morons.